American writer, actor and performer. Mead appeared in several of Andy Warhol’s underground films filmed at Warhol’s Factory, including Tarzan and Jane Regained… Sort of (1963) and Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964).
Born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and raised by wealthy parents, appeared in Ron Rice’s beat classic The Flower Thief (1960). A Village Voice film critic called Mead “the first underground movie star.”
In the mid-1970s, Gary Weis made some short films of Mead talking to his cat in the kitchen of his Ludlow Street apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side called Taylor Mead’s Cat. One film of Mead extemporizing on the virtues of constant television watching aired during the second season of Saturday Night Live.
While living on Ludlow Street, Mead read his poetry regularly at The Bowery Poetry Club. His last book of poems (published by Bowery Poetry Books) is called A Simple Country Girl. He was the subject of a documentary entitled Excavating Taylor Mead, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. The film shows him engaging in his nightly habit of feeding stray cats in an East Village cemetery after bar-hopping, and features a cameo by Jim Jarmusch, in which Jarmusch explains that once, when Mead went to Europe, he enlisted Jarmusch’s brother to feed the cemetery cats in Mead’s absence. Mead appeared in the final segment of Jarmusch’s 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes.
Mead died on 8 May 2013 in Denver, Colorado. He was 88.
Link to Wikipedia biography